The Omnirotor

The Omnirotor was an exercise of trying to imagine what the most versatile aerial vehicle could look like. By looking into the basic building block of multirotor UAV, the rotors, we attempted to create the most versatile rotor, which led to the hybrid vehicle concept that can apply its full thrust in any direction, fly, and move on ground.

Haptic Glance with Kirigami Grippers

Kirigami grippers are soft, continuous, infinite-dimensional systems that conform to the object’s shape during grasping. By sensorizing the gripper and measuring its deformation, we use AI to learn to recognize objects with a single grasp.

Control Allocation for Efficient Coaxial Rotors

Coaxial rotors are a compact arrangement of rotors that offer superior thrust capacity per area, enabling small but powerful drone designs. However, such an arrangement is notoriously inefficient when compared to ‘flat’ rotors. This work provides a control method to improve the efficiency of coaxial rotors by up to 11%.

Bio-Inspired Morphing Wings for VTOL Quadrotor

Multi-rotor UAVs, such as quadrotors, are excellent at hovering and are well suited to navigate space-constrained environments, such as indoors. However, they suffer from low range when compared to fixed-wing vehicles. Fixed-wing and other hybrid VTOL aircraft display longer flight range but are generally unsuited for flight indoors or in constrained spaces. Here, we propose a morphing wing attached to a quadrotor, which can increase the vehicle’s flight range when extended and still allow the exploration of space-constrained environments when the wings are contracted, offering unique advantages for search-and-rescue scenarios.